Alexey Smirnov's blog

This year I have already attended so many concerts as I never attended before when I was living in Tampere or on Long Island in the US. One reason is that the music played here is indeed world-class, for example Marc Minkowski is a famous French conductor, Anne Kauppi is one of the best Finnish pianists and is possible one of the best in the world. Most concerts are priced very cheaply at 10 Euros, there are free concerts as well.

I have noticed that French composers are very popular these days. It is a new trend I guess. While I was educated in music school in Russia we have been listening to Bach and Mozart, that is mostly German composers as well as of course lots of Russian music of Tchaikovsky, etc. but I don’t remember any French composers. Therefore, this year I have discovered Marcel Dupre, Gabriel Faure, and we can think of Frederick Chopin as a composer of French ancestry. Their music is not inferior to that of major classical composers, but it is very different. We definitely need to take a closer look at the French composers.

Marc Minkowski was a guest conductor at a YLE Radio Symphony Orchestra. The venue was the Stone Church. Quite traditionally, the churches are used as concert halls in Finland. It is interesting that this concert was sold out! Fortunately, I got my ticket one week in advance. Apparently, concerts on Friday nights are very popular. The concert included three parts. First, Symphoni #3 of Schubert was performed. Then after a short break Requiem of Gabriel Faure followed. It is an amazing piece of music. Traditionally, a requiem is performed when someone dies. Therefore, it should convey sadness. But this requiem is very different. It has quite optimistic tunes which are attributed to human’s acceptance into the Paradise. In the final part of the concert a trio of Mendelssohn was performed. A trio for piano, violin, and cello is a type of composition that keeps me thinking for a long time. Earlier I listened to a piano trio of Tchaikovsky thus now I think that trio is a major composition form on par with symphony or concert. But it is neither one of them. A concert is a competition between a solo instrument and the orchestra. A symphony involves too many parties. In terms of the meaning that a symphony conveys it is often related to a large-scale event or the destiny of the whole nation, something global. It might seem surprising that I attribute verbal description to any piece of music but as Picasso once said there is no abstract art. A painter has always an idea in mind and his/her abstract painting is the result of expressing the idea in this particular way. Therefore, a musical trio also conveys an idea and we can compare it to a certain type of painting. To me a trio is a conversation happening within a close group of friends who know each other very well. They might discuss various happenings in their life, the present and past. The only question is why is this worth depicting? I don’t remember who was saying that but the idea is that only great events constitute the true art, they convey a message to the next generations. What is that message in a afternoon-tea conversation of three people? Answering to that question would reveal the meaning behind a musical trio, it will make its art value measurable. But I still don’t understand what is the position of a trio among various composition forms such as symphonies, concerts, etc. This question is intriguing me a lot.

Another interesting event was Kirkko soikoon, a festival of church music which included classical music as well. It continued the whole week and included tens of concerts. During this festival I have bought a few CDs displayed above. Here is a brief description of the concerts that I have attended:

• Jan Lehtola performed Marcel Dupre in Kallio Church. There were two parts in his concert. Le chemin de la croix op. 29 was performed in the first one, Symphony for organ #1 “Passion” was performed after that.
• The next concert was in Helsinki Cathedral Crypt – a small hall that did not have even a stage. The grand piano was located very near the audience. It was very interesting to watch Anne Kauppi playing as I was sitting in one of the first rows very closely. This year people mark the 200-year anniversary of Frederick Chopin. A number of his etudes and ballades were performed. Gorgeous concert!
• On Friday there was another amazing concert – a 4-hour vocal marathon in the Old Church! The singers were signing along with organ or piano. Helsinki has lots of very nice voices!
• During weekend I went to Mikael Agricola Church located near my house. An youth ensemble called Higher Ground Band was performing there. I was surprised to see lots of families with children attending this concert. Typically, the audience of church concerts includes very few youth which I think marks the generation gap in the society. These energetic young people bridge the gap between younger and older, as well as between different religions. Traditionally, singing modernized songs is attributed to Baptist church. Finnish people belong mostly to the Lutheran church but they still attend Baptist concerts and sing along with them. The audience was raving, it was such a great concert! Below is a video, it is quite long. Watch it till the end to see how exciting the concert was!

I have attended Mobile Dev Camp. It was an event that included presentations from all major mobile vendors as well as workshops. To me it looks like it was targeted to younger developers as the level of the presentations was introductory. The funny thing was that organizers announced a development contest 48 hours before the conference. The topic of this application contest was outdoors. I did not participate because I thought I could not create a usable application within such short time. But in one category the winner has created an application while he was sitting in the conference. This means that there was almost no competition but the prizes were quite good. In each vendor category a new phone was offered as the prize. For example in the Apple category an iPad was awarded.

The conference started with a Nokia presentation in which Qt framework was described. This is a cross-platform development framework. A number of new features was described including Smart installer for Symbian that allows to add dependencies from your applications similar to debian packaging. Also changes were promised to Ovi Store which is now open for contribution only if you are a company. Obviously, it will become possible for individual developers to upload their apps to Ovi Store soon. It was recommended that developers take a close look at WebKit because it makes porting applications easy. However, later during the day the participants of a panel described the difficulties involved in porting WebKit applications because of lack of standards. But WebKit makes it possible to use native APIs from your web pages. For example if you want to find a pizza restaurant near YOU then you need to ask your device what is your current location and then use Ovi Maps API with those coordinates to display a map in the browser.

Another interesting presentation was that of Jürgen Scheible, the author of Mobile Python book. He described a number of tools such as Pluthon – python using Eclipse. It turns out that Python is available on touch devices nowadays. Jurgen mentioned that during his 3-5 day workshops people learn to program games involving touch gestures and animation. That’s a great achievement as teaching people to program is a challenging task.

There was a presentation dedicated to Microsoft Phone 7 system. As always, Microsoft has impressed the attendees of the conference with a game console available in its workshop room. I remember that when I attended another conference dedicated to Microsoft Mobile OS there was a whole Formula-1 simulator in that building! The new mobile OS looks quite impressive. They are saying that their goal is to add a 3rd dimension to the 2D screen of a mobile phone. That 3rd dimension comes from animations and effects, and therefore the new Microsoft Phone OS has lots of those.

In the Ericsson presentation the importance of a web browser was stressed. In particular, this company is developing web background service which allows the browser to perform tasks while in the background. They have also implemented a notification system as part of the browser. I guess they are moving in the direction of implementing a whole browser-based OS.

To summarize, the attendees of Mobile Dev Camp had an opportunity to meet with representatives of all major mobile vendors and listen to their ideas on the future of mobile technology. It is surprising that each company has its own view on this subject, thus we can expect lots of competition and interesting ideas implemented in the next generation of mobile devices.

I would like to describe what I am doing on weekends in Helsinki. Life in a city is certainly different from the life in a smaller town or a countryside. One of the challenges of this life is to do outdoors activities or at least some kind of sports to stay in shape.

This is why I start my weekend from attending a swimming pool, or in fact a Roman bath at Yrjonkatu. The definition of start of the day is quite relative because I am going there typically at 2PM. Earlier during the morning I am reading magazines mostly Communications of ACM or listening to radio. Not so long ago I have discovered Radio Freedom which features prominent journalists such as Vladimir Kara-Murza as well as lots of independent analysts. They often express interesting opinions. One thing that I have noticed is their use of references to literature or books that they have read recently. They are trying to apply the lessons learned from those books to modern life. This definitely characterizes this radio as that of intellectuals.

Anyway, in the swimming pool I am practicing fsreestyle wimming. I am swimming 500-1,000 meters depending on further plans. As of now, I can swim arbitrary long distances but not very fast, pretty much as fast as I could do it in breast stroke. However, the idea of swimming freestyle is to swim faster. But my body is experiencing tough resistance of water I am basically making my way through it. Instead I guess I need to flow through it, integrate with the water. But that takes lots of practice. Anyway, I have bought a 10-time ticket that allows me to get to any swimming pool in Helsinki for 36 Euros.

Then after the swimming pool I spend a few hours reading. For example, last weekend I was reading Economist magazine which I like quite a lot. I have bought another issue because of the funny cover image. There was a special report on social networks. Its main points are:

• MySpace was most visited social network until last year Facebook attracted more visitors. This is because MySpace was focusing on music and movies, whereas Facebook built a platform for content sharing. As broadband Internet spread through the world people got more interested in their own content.
• Twitter is very different from other social networks because it is like a broadcasting framework, not content sharing. The latter always assumes a certain degree of privacy, for example only your friends can see your pictures. In Twitter everybody can subscribe to your tweets.
• So far social networks have been barely profitable because advertisers don’t think that people will click on ads placed on social networks. This is because people are concentrated on their or their friends’ content, not on ads. But the special report argues that people trust their friends’ recommendations most, thus an ad saying that your friend has bought product X will likely influence your decision.
• Many smaller enterprises are using Twitter to advertise themselves. For example one bakery was tweeting upcoming donut sales and soon got over 50,000 followers. Another example is using Facebook as a game distribution platform. A classical Cafe World game has attracted over 10 million players in just a week. This is because of Facebook’s status updates. When your friend says that (s)he has become a Pizza Tycoon you think you should also become one. The network effect takes over. Gaming industry has never seen such growth rates before.
• People are increasingly using mobile devices to access social networks. Most of these devices are GPS-enabled. This opens another avenue for advertisers: location-aware ads.

On Sunday I am going to a lake to skate. I am preparing for a ice-skating marathon which will take place in the end of February in Kuopio. It is a funny thing which I will definitely describe in another post if I take part in it. The idea is that you have to skate as much as 200 km! But of course there are smaller distances such as 100km, 50km, 25km, and 12km. I will try to skate 25km. Because I am using traditional skates, not speed-skating type of gear my speed is not that great. A speed skater can maintain a 30km/h speed during the whole 200km race. Last weekend I skated 15km on a lake at Munkkiniemi and my speed was less than 10km/h.

Last but not least, I got used to going to movies. There is a gorgeous movie theater near my home in Tennispalatsi. I have bought a group ticket that gives access to 5 movies, each priced at 8.5 Euros. This is quite a big discount, as a single 3D movie is priced at 13 Euros. So far I have watched Avatar 3D, Up in the Air, and Sherlock Holmes. All are gorgeous movies.

Cities are notorious for their limited number of parking places. But during the winter things get even more complicated. The main problem is not finding a place to park your car but actually getting out of the parking. Here is a video that illustrates these words. In fact, this is not the toughest case that I saw out of my window. A couple of days ago a few guys spent half an hour trying to free up their entrenched friend.

I have celebrated New Year 2010 in Helsinki just as last year. But this time I was able to record a better video of the fireworks. Here it is.

During Christmas more snowstorms have arrived to Helsinki. Here is what the city looks like now. Surprisingly, the main roads are quite clean and the public transportation is running on time. But most of the cars are trapped in the snow on both sides.

I have attended many organ concerts this summer. Most of the time I was recording these amazing concerts. Now when the cold winter is coming those charming sounds of summer organ remind me of warm summer. I am listening to MP3 that I have recorded all the time instead of radio nowdays.

But I would also like to share this amazing music. I have built a library of my recordings using MIT Exhibit. Here it is. There are 100 MP3 available as a free download. The library has convenient features for searching using composer name, location, and artist.

The official concert series site is here but it has concert announcements only. The concerts in this series are free.

My apartment is located in the center of Helsinki. This studio is of course not the cheapest one but there are numerous advantages in living there because Helsinki is a great city.

For example, within walking distance there are several art galleries including Ateneum which nowdays hosts Picasso exhibition and Helsinki City Art Museum in which Tretyakov Gallery is showing its collection. So every weekend I have to make a tough decision whether I want to enjoy Cubism or Russian art of 19th century.

This Saturday I went to Tennis Palace, a building on Fredrikenkatu. It is unique in the sense that it hosts a big movie theater and two museums. I could never imagine Tretyakov Gallery next to a movie theater. In Moscow the museum is a building worth admiring itself, so nothing is located near it except a few other historical buildings. Here in Helsinki before you get to the Tretyakov Gallery you have to make your way through empty Coke cans, and popcorn, and trash.

The Enchanting Beauty exhibition contains works that you would not typically see in the Tretyakov Gallery. There lots of big paintings are displayed that occupy the whole wall and can stretch as far as 10 meters in length. The works presented here are typically in the storage of the Tretyakov gallery unless they rotate the paintings which I doubt they do.

Therefore, those who have not been to Tretyakov Gallery before this exhibition would not get impressed. In other words, these paintings do not represent the Tretyakov Gallery to the full extent. But if you have visited Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow then you would definitely appreciate these works because you will not see them anywhere else.

The content of the exhibition is mostly oriental which includes works of Vereshagin, Bryulov. But there are a few paintings depicting traditional Russian life. There are portraits of famous people including a portrait of last Tzar’s wife Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova and merchant Tretyakov’s wife.

The price of the exhibition is very low – 9 Euros. I guess it costs more to get into Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Thus I also bought a book showing the content of this exhibition along with explanatory articles.

Very good exhibition and I only wish I could go there again. I should have bought a yearly pass to the museum which costs only 20 Euros.

But after attending the museum I went on to explore other parts of Tennis Palace, in particular its movie theater. I decided to check out Michael Jackson’s This is It. Interesting movie. It is easy to notice that Michael suffers lots of pains, that he could either dance or sign but not both. But he is still the King of Pop. It is good that he was able to record all his songs before dying because the concert theme is quite global and goes far beyond the traditional entertainment show. For example, Michael explains that we should take good care of Earth otherwise it will deteriorate, etc.

There is another museum in Tennis Palace which I guess is called Museum of Cultures. Tennis Palace is a place where you can spend the whole day and enjoy a variety of activities!

This year I am attending Karjala Cup which takes place in Hartwall Arena in Helsinki. The opening game of this year was Russia-Finland. In total, over 10,000 people attended this game which is not bad compared to previous years.

When I was in Tampere I went to another Russia-Finland game. Back then Russia lost 2-4. I had an impression that Russians were a bit tired whereas Finns looked very strong. This time it was quite the opposite.

However, the game began as a total disaster for Russians. After 10 minutes they were loosing 0-3. This is because of the failures in defence. Later on I found out that a few defenders were sick or injured. After getting such huge advantage Finns calmed and tried to slow down the game. However, after the brake Russians decided to try to save the game. It is worth mentioning that they did not look ashamed or puzzled or anything. They just did their job in a tough situation. They were looking a lot more professional than they did in Tampere last year.

The first goal of Russians was one of the best goals I have seen. The attacker was waiting patiently whereas the Finnish defender looked nervous and started making spurious movements and finally fell down. This is when the attacker gave the puck to another attacker who scored a goal. This goal shows the great understanding of ice-hockey and its intrinsic rhythm that Russians have.

Finns did not perceive this goal as a warning sign and continued to play normally. Sometimes it looked that they were tired. But Russians were trying to use every possibility to score another goal. They managed to score when Finns were playing power play! Two Russian attackers were near the Finnish goal while only one defender was guarding Russian goalkeeper. This was a risky attempt and Russians might have lost everything there. But they were lucky.

Score 2-3 was not changed until the end of the third period. But during the last minute of the game Russian attacker Morozov made an easy shot towards Finnish goalkeeper. And he let the puck go into the goal to the surprise of everybody! Finns were going to win this game and already prepared to celebrate but everything changed during the last minute! What a surprise! I still cannot believe that the goalkeeper did not catch the puck after a simple shot in the most decisive moment!

Then the overtime passed and Russians won the lottery of penalty shots. Gorgeous game indeed. The skill of ice-hockey play of Russians is questionable because Finns granted them two goals, the second and the third. In the former goal the Finnish defenders were helpless, in the other was the goalkeeper. But Russians deserved the victory for their desire to play good ice-hockey and fight and recover from initial failure.

It is tempting to put this game into a historical context. Imaging wild Russians that arrived to a civilized Europe. Initially the Finns who are the Karjala Cup hosts were able to push back the barbarians but then a Russian riot followed. As prominent Russian historian Edward Radzinsky once said

Beware of Russian Riot – not always meaningless but always brutal.

(this is a modified quotation of Pushkin, the original version is beware of Russian riot, always meaningless and brutal).

Likewise, this game of Russians was not always meaningless.

This weekend I have attended Pablo Picasso exhibition in Helsinki Ateneum national gallery. This exhibition came from Picasso museum in Paris. Thus it represents only a part of what Picasso has created during his lifetime. It is funny that he was born in year 81 as well, thus I was able to see what he has been doing in my age. Quite impressive work, I would say. In other words, I liked his early works very much.

But his cubist works are also interesting. In ahoter ten years Picasso turned to a more classical style. There are lots of portraits with unusual color. It is an interesting exercise to try to interpret the meaning of each color of the face. But Picasso’s later works reveal the greatness of his talent. They are truly masterpieces.

After spending a couple of hours at the exhibition I went to the bookstore on the first floor in the same building. It is an amazing place. There are so many books on art of various kind – Egyptian art, Greek, European, and Russian art. There are lots of books in English. As I liked the exhibition so much I have bought a few art books.

Overall, great exhibition and I feel very lucky that it is located a 10-minute walk from the apartment in which I am staying at the moment. I wish I could spend more time at this wonderful exhibition.